‘Out of Nowhere,’ by Maria Padian

By MARCIA LERNER

February 8, 2013

A small town in Maine is flooded with Somali refugees looking for a better way of life. The soccer team gets a jolt of inspiration and outstanding play from its new, non-English-speaking players. They might just have a chance to beat their archrivals! At least, so says Tom Bouchard, the handsome, nice-guy team captain and narrator. Getting in the way are Tom’s nasty, dimwitted girlfriend Cherisse, his hapless bad-boy friend Donnie, and prejudices and culture clashes on both sides.

Maria Padian, the author of two previous young adult novels (“Jersey Tomatoes Are the Best” and “Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress”), offers plenty of story in “Out of Nowhere”: romantic rivalries, class tensions, family pressures. She has a firm sense of plot, and the circumstances her characters grapple with — cyberbullying, the burden of a burnout friend, the pain of growing and changing — will resonate with young readers. Padian is trying a broader canvas here than in her previous work, grappling not just with people but also with their larger cultures, but, alas, with mixed results. One can’t help rooting for her attempt to show us the wider world. Yet the constant stream of explanation drags down the narrative at the expense of both character and forward momentum.

This cultural responsibility is hardest on those characters who represent an ideology. There is the conservative Uncle Paul: “People who were born and raised in this town are on waiting lists for housing, while these folks show up by the busloads.” And the liberal Aunt Maddie: “These people have fled war zones, Paul. Where is your compassion?” Though these characterizations are leavened by contrary details — Paul turns out to have some compassion after all; Maddie watches “Survivor” — they are not enough to bring them to life. Other characters, like Saeed, the Somali soccer prodigy at the novel’s center, never fully emerge. Instead, we end up with a vague sense that he is, you know, good. “He wasn’t able to give you a straight story about where he’d come from, but this new customer? He was all right,” Tom tells us.

These difficulties are compounded by another formidable obstacle: Tom himself. Third in his class, a star athlete, beloved by the ladies, Tom is the antithesis of the usual teenage outsider narrator. Which is an appealing idea. It’s not often readers get to hear from a smart, athletic, funny guy. The problem is that he, too, remains somewhat indistinct. First, there is the voice itself: sometimes it comes across as intelligent and witty, other times close to dim. From the beginning, Tom sounds like something other than a real person: “I was stuck, O.K.? I’ll man up to that. We were playing Maquoit High School.”

First of all, who says, “I’ll man up to that”? And to hear a teenager say of his soccer team, “We were playing Maquoit High School,” raises the question: Does he use the full name of everything? This authorial inclination to explain and clarify ends up obscuring the characters. It’s hard to get worked up about skinheads invading the town when we have to pause for: “Ramadan, however, is a whole different deal. It’s based on the Islamic calendar, which is about 11 days shorter than the Gregorian calendar, which, B.T.W., is our calendar, which means that every year Ramadan begins 11 days earlier than the year before. I got that off Wikipedia.” This may all be true. It may even be interesting. But when you’re stopping your narrative to quote Wikipedia, you are not giving your story wings.

It’s frustrating, because there is a real story here. Over the course of the novel, Tom’s voice emerges and becomes more assured. But the people involved in his life never really become clear. Padian’s previous novels demonstrated a real confidence in the smaller story and an ease with the emotions we humans are prey to. I wish she had trusted her characters here to bring their histories and cultures along with them, rather than the other way around.

OUT OF NOWHERE

By Maria Padian

337 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $16.99. (Young adult; ages 12 and up)

Marcia Lerner, who writes the blog The Diamond in the Window, is working on a novel, “Loopholes.”